The Trump administration has effectively established a federal mandate for hospitals to improve the nutritional quality of food given to inpatients, furthering the “eat real food” objective of the Make America Healthy Again movement.
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz announced at a Monday event in Miami that hospitals will be required to follow the Dietary Guidelines for Americans to receive Medicare reimbursement funding.
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, published by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins in January, is a governing document that guides federally funded food programs, including food stamps and school lunches.
The guidelines have been the main nutrition improvement tool of the administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, encouraging people to make their diet as close to farm-to-table as possible and to cut out excessively processed foods.
Oz and Kennedy announced that hospitals will be required to bring their food standards in line with federally set dietary practices based on the broad guidance from the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
Oz sent what he called a “special alert memo” to hospital systems on Monday morning, informing them that they will need to “ensure that menus and diets meet individual patients’ nutritional needs in accordance with the recognized dietary practices.”
The policy memo will likely have sweeping effects across the country, as nearly all hospitals in the United States depend on Medicare funding for survival, according to the American Hospital Association.
More than 82% of U.S. hospitals have two-thirds of their inpatients covered by Medicare or Medicaid. Almost all, 96%, of hospitals receive Medicare reimbursement for at least half of their patients.
Kennedy called the move “essentially a federal mandate” but said multiple times during the event that hospital CEOs were consulted before Oz’s memo was issued. The secretary said supply chain difficulties have stood in the way of most hospitals implementing such a program.
“I’m really grateful to the hospital CEOs all across the country who are now starting to adopt good food policy,” Kennedy said, “and we want to do everything that we can to encourage the procurement companies and the middlemen to help this process and to help us all, partner, make sure that we’re getting American patients the best food in the world.”
Administration officials announced the event at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami, which is beginning a farm-to-patient food initiative for its inpatients by forming relationships with local farmers and working with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
White House health adviser Calley Means said at the event that it makes “absolutely no sense that hospitals are serving sugary drinks and processed food, inflammatory processed food, to their patients, 90% of whom are dealing with chronic conditions.”
“We’re taking some top-down action,” Means said, “like this memorandum from CMS, which is saying hospitals treating patients with chronic diseases should not be serving sugary drinks, should not be serving refined carbohydrates, and should not be serving ultraprocessed food.”
Means noted that HHS has “had an outpouring of requests” for public-private partnerships to advance the MAHA agenda, separate from more coercive enforcement mechanisms.
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Using Medicare funding to achieve goals in healthcare is not a new tactic for the Trump administration.
In December 2025, Oz and Kennedy announced a new proposed rule that would prohibit Medicare reimbursement for hospital systems that provide gender transition care, including hormone therapies and surgeries, for minors. Implementation of that rule has been stalled by the courts.
